Monday, 30 May 2011

Amateur or Professional?

I went to an art exhibition at the weekend, the annual 'show of work' of a local art club a friend of mine belongs to. It was....interesting. Not because the work was dreadful - because it wasn't, it was uniformly competent - but because none of it was good enough to be in a commercial art gallery.

I see a lot of writing that is competent. It does what it intends to. It tells a story, it gets characters from A to B, and yet it just isn't good enough for publication. (In my opinion, of course, and all this comes with a great caveat that comment on art or writing subjective and open to challenge.) The trouble is, you could be in the top 1% - ie the best out of 100 writers you know - and still not be good enough. I expect you have to be in the top 1,000, or even the top 10,000 to get published.

I was talking to a poet friend who said that people never understood how she could tell immediately whether a poem was good or bad. 'I've been writing and reading and teaching poetry for twenty years,' she said. 'I can tell, just like that.'

I know what she means. Experience makes such a difference, which is why your friend saying they really like your work doesn't mean very much (unless they're actively involved in looking at new writing). I've seen a lot of student work over the past twelve years that I've been teaching, yet I expect I've seen less than an agent sees in a year, or even six months. Just imagine how acute their eye must be, how sharply they read, how quickly they judge if it's worth a further look or not.*

If you want to be a professional writer - ie you want someone to give you money for your work - then you have to be professional about it. If you don't want to be a professional writer - and there's no reason why you should, the best reason for writing is for the sheer pleasure of it - then you can do what you like. But don't confuse the two. Competent isn't good enough.

*That's not to say they don't get it glaringly wrong sometimes. Like the agent who told me I was wasting my time about a book that went on to be a bestseller in 14 countries....

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About Me

I've written five novels, the most recent being Kissing Mr Wrong (shortlisted for the RNA novel of the Year 2011) and A Single to Rome (longlisted for RNA Novel of the Year 2010). I'm a full time writer, but I also like teaching creative writing which I've done for the Universities of Oxford and Bristol, and for ASE which is a branch campus of Franklin and Marshall College, USA. I'm the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Bath - I must be growing up...
About a million years ago I was an actor and played Vicky, Rodney's girlfriend, in Only Fools and Horses. I divide my life between two of the most beautiful places in the UK, Bath and St Ives and can't believe how lucky I am.
www.sarahduncan.co.uk